Contact centers are employed by various business entities and government agencies to provide customer service. Contact centers are typically one means for handling customer enquiries, orders, complaints, etc. Providing quick, efficient, and timely responses for such incoming requests is a common goal of the contact center. However, there is an inherent tension involved in accomplishing these goals. Reducing the waiting time of incoming calls in order to provide quick responses can be accomplished by hiring more agents to field these calls. However, hiring more agents to reduce the waiting time increases costs, and frequently results in various times during the day when agents may not be used in a productive manner because incoming call volumes have dropped off. Thus, efficiency may suffer. However, maximizing utilization of agents may result in callers waiting an unacceptable time period. Attempting to find an acceptable balance to the operational goals of the contact center and customer expectations can be difficult, and typically involves continually monitoring, measuring, and adjusting various operational parameters in the contact center.
Various technological mechanisms have been identified as potential solutions for “evening out” agent demand for handling calls in order to ensure agents are efficiently utilized. The goal is to allow a fixed number of agents to handle peaks and valleys of incoming call levels in an efficient manner. For example, one solution developed many years ago is to place callers into a queue, if agents are not available. Thus, the caller waits for an available agent. However, callers would then hang up, thereby abandoning the queue, if the caller is required to wait too long. In response, messages were provided to the caller indicating an expected wait time. Mechanisms were developed where callers could leave a message and receive a subsequent call back. Those skilled in the art will recognize that there are various routing, queuing, callback, and messaging mechanisms that attempt to address the basic problem of handling customer interactions in an efficient, timely, and cost effective manner.
Complicating the operational aspect of the contact center is that customers now have various mechanisms for contacting a business, and may have different preferences for how they originate the contact or how to be responded to their original contact. Customers may send a short message service (“SMS”) text, send an instant message, initiate a request via a web page, use various forms of social media, initiate a phone call, or send an email as the initial form of communication. While the business entity may respond in a like form (e.g., using the same channel type), this may not always be the case.
Frequently, how communications occur with the customer, either initially or in response, may depend on the urgency and nature of the communication. For example, an urgent request from a customer may drive the customer to use one channel type over another. Frequently, for example, sending a SMS text is associated with a greater level of urgency than sending an email or a hardcopy letter. On the other hand, a complicated enquiry may not be easily conveyed in the limited capabilities associated with an SMS text, and may force the customer to use email or a phone call. However, though a question may be complicated, the answer may be relatively simple e.g., a simple yes or no, and the caller may find it acceptable to receive the answer conveyed in a different manner than the original request.
Providing a timely, efficient, and effective response by a contact center may be complicated in that a variety of options exist for how the response may be communicated. However, in some instances, the contact center may offer the customer various options for how the response is to be provided, and certain options may facilitate the contact center in providing a timely, efficient, and effective response. Therefore, mechanisms are required to allow a contact center flexibility in providing a timely, efficient, and effective response to a customer enquiry.